Transcript of "Online Communities Best Practices Deployment Tips"

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2Online Community Best Practices:Getting Real Business Value from SocialCustomer EngagementIntroductionWhat have your customers done for you lately? Sounds like a foolish question, doesn’tit? Customers buy your products and services. You serve them, not the other wayaround.But for leading enterprises across industries, customers are contributing to companysuccess in many ways beyond making purchases. Through engagement in onlinecommunities, they identify problems and suggest possible solutions, they spark newproduct/service ideas by describing their experiences and their needs, and they create apositive brand experience for other customers.In this paper, Lithium Technologies, the leading provider of Social Customer solutionsthat deliver real business results, shares its answers to four questions: What is an online community? What does it take to create a successful community? What are companies doing with online communities today? What is the business case for online communities?A recent study by Jupiter Research found that while only 12% of companies providecustomer-facing forums on their site, 41% percent of customers had consulted forumsover the past 12 months regarding purchases they were making or intended to make.

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3Online Community Best Practices:Getting Real Business Value from SocialCustomer EngagementWhat Is an Online Community?An online community is at once both a technology platform and a group of peopleworking together for a common goal.As a technology platform, online communities begin with forums or discussionboards. Online community forums today are a far cry from the bulletin boards youmay recall from the early days of computing. They are accessible not only online, butvia email and syndication (RSS). Users have a wide range of choices for personalizingtheir experience, from discussion format (threaded or linear, most recent thread ormost recent post) to basic look and feel. Companies have a wide range of choicesfor deploying forums, from making them accessible to all users or only some, todetermining what each user should be enabled to do in each forum (read, post, reply,rate, edit, delete, subscribe, etc.).Other common elements include blogs, which provide a platform for experts within thecompany or within the community; chat, which ranges in format from one-on-one liveconversations to auditorium-style events with moderated Q&A, and private messaging,which allows users to communicate while protecting their privacy.A robust search tool, which can incorporate knowledge base content into search resultsalongside community content, is another key element. A reputation system, whichrecognizes contributions and provides incentives to continue participation, is also amust. A final requirement is a profile system in which users can share professionaldetails, add friends or associates, and manage their online identity.Considered as a group of people with a common goal or interest, an online communityis much, much more. It is, first and foremost, a collection of people sharing theirknowledge or perspectives with one another. It is as diverse as your customer base,including novices and experts, new buyers and long-time customers, web-savvyindividuals and those who’ve just never used a forum before. And it takes the rightcombination of technology and best practices to make it successful.

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4Online Community Best Practices:Getting Real Business Value from SocialCustomer EngagementWhat Does It Take to Create a Successful Community?Our experience shows that successful online communities do ten things right:1. Have a business owner who oversees budget and sets direction.Online communities are relatively easy to start. Technologies are widely available, andmany begin as “innovation” or business strategy ad-hoc projects started by those whorecognize that customers want and need communities to answer their questions orconnect with others with their same interests. However, successful communities havesupport – and accountability – at the top.2. Have a community manager who conducts planning and day-to-day decision-making.Like any other business initiative, online communities require planning andmanagement. The community manager is responsible for basic configurationdecisions, feature choices, forum structure, and granting permissions and roles. Thecommunity manager is also responsible for communication out to the community, andis the single point of contact for community members who have issues or concernsto resolve. Lithium’s software empowers the community manager with a wide rangeof administration and configuration options that eliminate frequent requests forengineering resources.3. Have a moderator who sets tone, enforces rules, and helps users.The moderator has daily responsibility for ensuring a positive and productiveenvironment for all users. The moderator provides the ongoing guidance andacknowledgement that keeps regular users on track and active users motivated andinvolved. Moderators also organize events and promotions, answer user questions aboutthe forums, prepare regular reports, and escalate problems or issues, when needed,to the appropriate parties. Moderator tasks are made more efficient by the extensivemessage processing, user processing, usage tracking, and reporting features Lithiumprovides.

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5Online Community Best Practices:Getting Real Business Value from SocialCustomer Engagement4. Define roles for staff and users and configure software appropriately.Two key questions to ask when launching a community are: a) who are the users ofthis community, and do any of those users need special rights or permissions to betruly productive? And b) what staff inside our organization will touch this community inany way, and what rights and permissions do they need? Lithium’s platform offers 54specific permissions that can be assigned at the community, group or individual level,as well as by specific community feature, category, or forum.5. Create a set of comprehensive guidelines.Guidelines tell users what the community’s mission is, and helps them understandhow they best can make their community experience successful. They also define thekinds of activities that will not be permitted. Guidelines represent a virtual contractbetween a company and the customer who use the community. The company commitsto provide a productive environment, and users agree, as a condition of use, to abide bythe rules. Good guidelines, and good moderation, eliminate 99.9% of problems that canbe encountered in communities.6. Define actions that will take place when issues occur.When problems do occur, whether they are repetitive customer complaints or moreserious violations, moderators must take action for everyone’s benefit. From theability to store standard messages to banning or suspending users, Lithium’s softwaresupports good moderation.7. Make community visible to potential users.Customers can’t participate in a community that they can’t see. Good placement on thehome page, support home page, navigation, and product pages is critical to the successof a community. Periodic email outreach or special promotions don’t hurt either.

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6Online Community Best Practices:Getting Real Business Value from SocialCustomer Engagement8. Create the proper structure and atmosphere to engage users.Companies often begin with a structure too broad to enable early community usersto feel at home. Instead of a board for every product or every region, successfulcommunities make sure that the community also has the minimum number ofcontributions per forum to feel alive and active. When usage scales, they expandfrom there.9. Manage “superusers” differently from other users.It’s a truism that every online community is, at a minimum, two communities: thecommunity of the average user, who comes once a month, or once a week, or may bethere for the first time today, and the community of the superuser, who comes oncean hour, once a day, or one hundred times more often than that. Superusers should bemanaged differently than regular users. They need, at a minimum, a robust reputationsystem like that in Lithium’s software, which recognizes and rewards their contributionat every step.10. Focus measurement on business value.Many of the metrics that come out of community platforms – page views, posts, replies,etc. – are useful in tracking community activity, but mean little to the business peoplewho sponsor and fund community efforts. Developing successful communities dependson taking a rich set of community metrics – Lithium offers more than 60 metrics out ofthe box – and combining them with business data that helps paint a vivid picture of thevalue the community creates every day. See the final section of this paper, What Is theBusiness Case for Online Support Communities?, for a discussion of the most commonbusiness cases for online support communities today.Forrester Research reports that, with customers resolving their own problems byreading forum content, fewer email, chat, and phone interactions reach agents, therebydeflecting live agent interactions and cutting overall support costs.

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7Online Community Best Practices:Getting Real Business Value from SocialCustomer EngagementWhat Are Companies Doing with OnlineCommunities Today?Here is a sampling of what companies are doing with online communities today: Integrating community with existing support processes, so that customers have aseamless experience across multiple support channels. Creating buzz for product launches with micro-sites powered by an onlinecommunity. Integrating community with CRM systems, so that unanswered questions are auto-escalated into direct support channels. Adding blogs for executives and/or product experts to more efficiently share thecompany’s best and more current knowledge with customers. Harvesting customer insights from the community and distributing reports tointernal groups in direct support, product development, marketing, communications,and legal. Embedding community content throughout their website to make their sites moreinteractive and customer-focused. Using online community interactions to drive offline (retail store) traffic Integrating commerce with community, so that community users can move directlyfrom dialogue to a purchase decision. Composing instant focus groups or beta groups to test new products/services orobtain feedback on ideas. Inviting partners to participate, either informally or through sponsored forums. Using communities as a learning tool for new support reps or other new employees. Generating brand loyalty by providing a place where like-minded customers cangather to discuss common topics of interest.

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8Online Community Best Practices:Getting Real Business Value from SocialCustomer EngagementWhat Is the Business Case for Online Communities?Companies typically think about community value in four ways: Avoided costs: For most companies, it costs much less to resolve a customerquestion in an online community than it does to handle the call in the call center.Companies have reported savings of more than $500,000 annually from their onlinecommunity efforts.1Communities also divert traffic from more expensive optionssuch as call centers. One company found that more than 40% of community userssurveyed said that, if forums were unavailable, their first resort would be directsupport channels.2 Customer loyalty: Communities are fundamentally about loyalty, so it’s no surprisethat companies with online communities find significant improvements both inlikelihood to remain a customer and likelihood to recommend.3Companies offeringsubscription services have found that community users remain customers up to50% longer than non-community users.4 Customer satisfaction: Customers appreciate being given the opportunity to sharetheir experiences. Research shows that customers who have the opportunity toprovide feedback are more satisfied than those who don’t. Perhaps that’s whycommunity users say they are more satisfied with forums than with other self-service support options.5 Sales: Online community users buy more, and buy more often, than non-communityusers. A recent study published in the Harvard Business Review found thatcommunity users at an online auction site spent up to 54% more on average thannon-community users.6Rather than focusing on a single metric, companies today are looking at communityvalue across all these areas to better understand the impact of their investment incommunity. Just as important, online communities provide continuous insight into thethoughts and experiences of customers — an invaluable asset for anyone in productivedevelopment, support, marketing, or executive management.Lithium has a 10-year record of accomplishments and innovations in powering onlinecommunities that are proven successes. And with the right combination of technologyand best practices, more and more companies around the world can deploy their ownsuccessful online communities.